Traffic and demand management refers to measures such as parking management, reallocating urban space in favour of sustainable modes of transport (including shared space), access controls, road pricing, and traffic signal control strategies.
Vienna’s pilot project on banning cars at the start of the school day (see related ELTIS News) has ended and has turned out to be a success. In the course of the pilot, Vienna closed the access road to the “Vereinsgasse” primary school in the Leopoldstadt district of the city to cars and other motorised vehicles at the start of the school day, i.e. between 7.45 and 8.15. In this period, cars were not able to use the direct access road to the school, although cyclists were able to continue their trips.
Within the framework of the Horizon2020 METAMORPHOSIS project, the municipality of Merano/Meran decided to engage children and local inhabitants in several participatory workshops to co-create possible solutions for more people-oriented public space. Children are considered as key actor to build sustainable cities and for this reason are directly involved in each phase of the project.
Last week the new Sustainable Mobility Ordinance came into force in the City of Madrid, promoted by the City Council. The measure aims to regulate new forms of urban and shared mobility for the first time, simultaneously promoting public transport use and the safety of pedestrians and people with reduced mobility.
The region of North Holland has run the first pilot project of autonomous vehicles on public roads in the Netherlands.
The cars were connected with each other and with intelligent traffic lights. The intelligent traffic lights were able to monitor the traffic, anticipate traffic levels and to communicate with oncoming vehicles. They were also able to inform the cars of the time remaining before the lights turned green or red and to stay green longer if this helped to improve the flow.
Experience in the Danish capital Copenhagen, suggests that preventing motorised traffic from using short sections of a major thoroughfare enhances the use of the route by cyclists. This is the result of the implementation of so-called 'filtered permeability' on two sections of Nørrebrogade, in central Copenhagen.
On 24 October, Managing Automated Vehicles Enhances Network (MAVEN) is running a workshop on the impact of automated vehicles on traffic management.
The workshop aims to:
The City of London clearly faces air pollution problems. Recently, it has announced a number of initiatives to tackle the challenge, including the Ultra Low Emission Zone. Now, London has taken another step and announced tests to restrict access to ultra-low emission vehicles (ULEVs) only. The announcement fits well with London’s air pollution mitigation actions and a change to on-street parking charges has been introduced which makes use of different charges for vehicles with lower emitting cars paying less whilst levying a higher parking charge on more polluting vehicles.
Different cities within the UK are investigating launching smart projects and developments to advance local service capability, evolve their competitiveness and enhance sustainability. One such example of an initiative designed to enhance city ‘liveability’ is ‘smart parking systems’.
The European Transport Safety Council (ETSC) identifies solutions to ambitious road safety targets.
In May 2018, the European Union refined its road safety targets. Retaining the existing target to halve road deaths by 2020 on 2010 levels, the EU added an additional target to halve road deaths by 2030 on 2020 levels. The ETSC has called on the Austrian Government to support action on EU targets.
The ETSC has identified the following solutions for the Austrian Government:
